Sadly, No!

The Wall Street Journal, June 18, 2004:

It cites CIA Director George Tenet as saying that al Qaeda’s ability to conduct an anthrax attack is “one of the most immediate threats the United States is likely to face.”

The WSJ, June 4, 2004:

It’s a compliment to Mr. Tenet’s political savvy that he was able to leave on his own terms despite the Agency’s mistakes during his seven-year tenure. The largest was the failure to penetrate al Qaeda before 9/11, and more recently the many misjudgments about Iraq, which go well beyond whether or not Saddam Hussein had WMD.

June 18, 2004:

Somehow the Commission also omitted any reference to Mr. Tenet’s 2002 letter to Congress. “We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade,” he wrote.

June 4, 2004:

For all of that, the CIA is still a long way from the anti-terror spearhead it needs to become. That’s especially clear from its performance in Iraq, where the Agency has been consistently wrong since it told the first President Bush that Saddam would fall within two months of the Gulf War.

June 18, 2004:

And, [Tenet wrote] “We have credible reporting that al-Qaeda’s leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire W.M.D. capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al-Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.”

June 4, 2004:

The Agency has relied on a Sufi network of Iraqi agents that time and again proved inadequate. The CIA favored an anti-Saddam coup strategy it couldn’t execute, predicted defections of Republican Guard units that never took place, and was twice wrong about having located and killed Saddam. It also failed to predict that the regime’s strategy would be to melt away during the invasion and counterattack with a terrorist insurgency.

This post is dedicated to Robert Louis Stevenson.

In the comments to this post, Retardo from Elementropy asks if Richard Perle’s blog is one of our sideprojects.

We wish it were, but… well, you know how it goes. Do stop by Richard Perle’s Musings anyway.

From a spam email we received today:

From: Alfaro [[email protected]]
To: Woodruff [[email protected]]
Subject: Re: nietzsche

So many of our emails bear that very exact subject, we couldn’t tell it apart from our legitimate emails.

Coming a close number two to the old “Iraq is doing way better than Germany was in 1945” trick, we get another serving of the Stephen “Case Closed” Hayes diet at TownHall today, courtesy of Richard Miniter:

Every day it seems another American soldier is killed in Iraq. These grim statistics have become a favorite of network news anchors and political chat show hosts. Nevermind that they mix deaths from accidents with actual battlefield casualties; or that the average is actually closer to one American death for every two days; or that enemy deaths far outnumber ours. What matters is the overall impression of mounting, pointless deaths.

Does it look at all familiar? It sure does — indeed, it is word for word the exact same column Mr. Miniter published on TechCentralStation in September 2003.

Timeless crap.

In a post earlier this week, we accused Michelle Malkin of making shit up. Unfortunately, “number errors” crept into our work (not because of a political judgment or because we decided to cook the books or anything like that,) and we were much more wrong than right. We apologize to Mrs. Malkin, and look forward to her correction about Dick Cheney’s secret location.

They have research down to an art over at The Corner:

QUICK BLEG [Rich Lowry]
Anyone out there have any special expertise in the post-WWII occupations of Germany and Japan, and especially the problems associated with them? Would love to hear from you (but not after 12:45). Thanks…
Posted at 10:27 AM [Emphasis added]

Gee, we wonder if Rich will run with this whole “things are much better in Iraq than they were in Germany or Japan after the war” angle. Not that anyone has done that one before.

[Added link.]

…it’s going to get us a visit from the FBI, it’s a day early, it’s ripped from today’s headlines, it’s a 6MB file, it’s our best Flash animation yet (or as Larry King would put it: if you only see one Flash animation this year, see this one!,) it’s time you click here, sit back and enjoy.

Our thanks to Pete from The Dark Window for his help with the search for just the right wingnuttery to use.

Very special thanks to John Young from Cryptome for permission to use these pictures.

Background blog commentary from No More Mister Nice Blog, MaxSpeak, 1115.org, Wonkette, Random Mentality, and much 2002 discussion from Amygdala.

SullyWatch quotes Andrew Sullivan:

I haven?t run a pledge drive this year because I?m unsure of how long I can keep this up …

We thought the end of the sentence even more interesting however:

… but you can help keep this blog alive by donating here.

In other words, I’m not running a pledge drive but please give me money. Is Andrew getting ready to pull the plug? Given what he announced in December, this non pledge drive drive is quite suspect:

PLEDGE DRIVE UPDATE: Here’s a penultimate request for help with the site. After tomorrow, I won’t bug you again in the Dish for a year, so please consider a modest donation to the site if you read it regularly and want to see it continue. It takes enormous time, thousands of bucks, and constant attention to keep this blog as content-filled and as current as it is.

Didn’t raise so much six months ago, did you Andrew? Someone better give him enough money for a pair of pants, as we believe the ones he’s wearing now may be on fire.

The “Plamegate” Nonsense

Valerie Plame is a slut.

Want something even better? It’s YoshiRadio?! (4 minutes of Adam’s analysis of the Canadian elections, converted to MP3 from Adam’s original WAV file by your faithful servants, 1.5MB file.)

When we had to check ourselves into the hospital earlier this year (big building, lots of sick people,) we were lucky to count on a few good men women (sorry Blair!) to keep things going while we were away. Some of you (you know who you are) have asked ever since we returned what has happened to Peanut, where is Peanut, we want Peanut, go away Sadly!, I really miss Peanut, you suck Sadly bring Peanut back. And on and on. Well shut your whining pie holes.

Peanut now has her own web site. Visit it. Add it to your favorites folder. Put it on your blogroll. (And please don’t forget about us.) For now however, go have a peanut.